


Honestly

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Barn Wanking, Crushes, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 17:23:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6338344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blackwall has a crush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honestly

"Blackwall?"

He jumped. The name scared him every time. After a few deep breaths, he turned to face the Inquisitor.

Somehow that scared him worse.

"Don't tell me this is where they stuck you," said Trevelyan, turning in the middle of the barn. "There are rooms in the west wing if you don't mind a thorn bush growing up through the floor and a dead rat in your wardrobe." 

"I'll take the furry company I've made here, thanks." Blackwall's laugh came out rough. "Is there uh, something I can do for you?"

"Just making the rounds, seeing what everyone thinks of my castle." He smirked. "Is it to Constable-Warden Gordon Blackwall's exacting standards?"

They hadn't stood this close since the attack on Haven. Trevelyan had run out of the chantry past everyone streaming in, into the freezing night amidst monsters and magisters to buy them a few seconds to escape.

It would have been a good martyr's death. Suitable for the Herald of Andraste. And yet here he was: returned from the storm to repay blood with blood against the beast that made the grave error of attacking the Inquisition.

Standing two feet away.

In a hot barn.

In a new beige tunic and leggings that were tight in....areas.

"I uh, want to examine our fortifications," said Blackwall lamely.  

 

* * *

 

They found themselves on the castle wall overlooking the ice melt as it flowed into the lake far below. The wind should have serrated them at this altitude, but it slackened against some ancient ward, protected as they were by Skyhold's unnatural balm.

It still managed to flop Blackwall's hair in his face and make a mess of his beard.

"We'll be able to see Corypheus coming from miles away," he said awkwardly.

"On the other hand, that means he can see us from miles away." Trevelyan leaned against the wall and grinned his fox grin.

Sly, quick, clever, that was him—everything Blackwall was not. The man could spin like a feather on the wind, incinerating bandits with a bored flick of fire and lightning, laughing the whole time.

“Let him come," said Blackwall. "I swear I'll take the twisted bastard down, even if I have to die to do it. My sword, my life, is yours."

"I'm grateful for your support?" Trevelyan's mouth twitched.

"It's my job, isn't it? Killing darkspawn." He put some space between them. "Tell me honestly. Are you what they say you are? Andraste's chosen?"

Trevelyan shrugged. "I really wish they'd figure out that I'm nobody."

"You're _somebody_. Don't you see what you are to them? Without you, they'd be consumed by despair. We all would. They need you to be Andraste's messenger. It gives them hope. The truth doesn't matter." 

He surged forward, and Trevelyan took a step back, surprised. Blackwall could taste how bad his own breath was and wanted to die.

“You didn’t bring me up here to kill me, did you?” asked Trevelyan, only half-joking.

“Not today,” Blackwall promised, though there was a madness swelling inside him. And, because he could, because it was friendly, he clapped Trevelyan on the back. The Inquisitor didn't shrug his hand off as they made their way down the stairs into the yard.

 

* * *

 

Later that night, things got weird in the barn.

Not that it started out that way. The horses snuffed and dragged their hooves in their stalls as usual. Clouds of moths and midges swarmed around the lantern hanging on the post above his bedroll as ever. He leaned up and blew it out, same as always.

Then, in the dark, he slid a hand under his wools.

Nothing odd about that, either. His mind flicked down the old list of conquests: a red-haired serving wench from Tantervale, a lady knight from Markham, an elvhen farrier who tended his horse in Val Chevin....women he barely spoke to and never knew and therefore never had the chance to let down. They melded together into a faceless form, and he imagined them straddling him, sliding their fingers through his chest hair, curling their fingers tenderly then tighteningly around a nipple-

And, of course, the image of Trevelyan naked against the castle wall dropped into his mind, innocent as an apple.

He stopped. It was beyond the _pale_ of disrespect, the Inquisitor would loathe him for it.....

But he didn't remove his hand.

He had always wondered what it would be like with a man. And Trevelyan....maker, Trevelyan was like a robber prince out of a song. He had been prepared to die for them, whereas Blackwall had done what he'd always done: run the other way.

What would his fingers feel like? Long and bony as the rest of him, scarred by mage fire and calloused by his staff....they'd twist his nipple and make him whimper harder than any woman in his fantasies ever had.

He shouldn't. It was shameful, desperate, degenerate. He did it anyway.

Trevelyan grinned like a fox in his mind.

Disgusted, he wiped his hand in the straw. The Inquisitor deserved so much more than an old lech touching himself to his memory. Blackwall re-laced his breeches and solemnly swore that it would never happen again. 

 

* * *

 

It happened twice more that night. Fortunately, Trevelyan left for Redcliffe with the Tevinter fop the next day. Thank the bloody Maker. 

 

* * *

 

Blackwall started making toys after that night. His mother always said the best cure for impure thoughts was busy hands, and he was in desperate need of penance. If he could not rub Trevelyan out of his mind, he would find some other way. 

He selected a cut of wood from the lumber pile outside the barn. He set it on his workbench, made a few marks, and took up the chisel.

_Trevelyan’s teeth in his throat—_

Wood chips flew past his face.

_Trevelyan unbuckling his belt—_

Sweat soaked his tunic.

_Trevelyan’s hot breath like flame down his belly—_

The sun dipped below the castle wall.

_Trevelyan tongue wet and wicked as it swirled around—_

“Messer Blackwall—oh my.”

Josephine stood in the entrance to the barn, mouth agape as she took in the heap of wooden toys spilling across the floor.

“That’s quite a pile.”

By the end of the week, Josephine sent a servant to collect the toys in crates.

“The children in the camps will be most delighted,” she said brightly, if a little baffled.

By the second week, the pile overflowed the barn and Josephine assigned two merchants to cart them out.

“The orphans in the neighboring village will be overjoyed. Who knew you were such a craftsman?”

By the third week, a team was assigned to manage the shipments flowing out of Skyhold.

"Are you certain there's nothing you wish to talk about?" Josephine touched his arm. "Nothing at all?" 

“Just something to keep the hands busy." He bit his lip as he chiseled a horse head, and when Trevelyan’s smile flashed in his mind, chiseled harder.

Josephine, bless her, left with a murmur about his admirable charity. 

 

* * *

 

The Inquisitor's business in Redcliffe meandered into a month of dragon slaying and Warden hunting in Crestwood. Sera and Bull returned to Skyhold with singed eyebrows and loud stories, but Dorian and Trevelyan rode through the gate quieter than they had left. No one quite knew what to make of that.

In any case, from then on Trevelyan was always on the move. The man was trailed at all times by advisors and nobles and requisition officers, seemingly everywhere at once around the keep. 

Blackwall became very good at disappearing.

One near miss, while Trevelyan hurried down the courtyard path, Blackwall leaped into a bush, right as Solas was taking the stairs to the outer bailey. Trevelyan moved on, the elf did not.

"Are you truly planning on avoiding him for the rest of your life?" asked Solas. 

"I don't know what you mean," said Blackwall.

"You are in a ficus bush covered in fire ants."

Blackwall staggered out of the leaves and tripped over a root. He pulled a spider out of his beard, ignoring the insufferable smirk on Solas's face.

"It must be a dread secret indeed to keep you in such a state of disquiet," said Solas.

Blackwall said nothing to that.

"He rides for the Western Approach anon, so you'll soon have the keep to yourself again. Though you must know, a wound cannot heal until it is lanced. " Solas strode off, smug as ever, leaving Blackwall to his bug bites.

 

* * *

 

Sure enough, the Inquisitor rode for Approach in the morning. He took Dorian with him again, the Tevinter princeling preening about their planned stopover in Val Royeaux. It made Blackwall want to break something. 

Instead, he returned to the hayloft and crawled back into bed.  

 

* * *

 

“There you are.”

Blackwall smashed his thumb into a screw and cursed. He turned, and found Trevelyan in the barn door. His skin was two shades darker than it had been when he left, and the bridge of his nose was peeling. He was still covered in the dust of the road.  

"You're back?!" Blackwall squeaked. "You're back."

"Didn't you hear the horns?" Trevelyan thumbed over his shoulder to Master Dennett tending his mount. "I keep telling Cullen the damned things are going to cause an avalanche someday just so everyone can watch me fall on my ass in the courtyard." 

"I must have been distracted."  

Blackwall kicked a wooden rattle under the table. The Inquisitor seemed....perkier somehow. He wore a real smile instead of his usual mocking one.

Nevermind a pair of riding breeches that left nothing to the imagination.

“So, about the Wardens….” said Trevelyan. 

Wardens. Yes. Adamant. He tried to listen, but Trevelyan’s lips were wet and shining as if he’d been biting them. It had been months since Blackwall had seen him...

"Please, wait." Blackwall's voice wavered. "I have to tell you something."

"Oh?" Trevelyan's smile pushed his eyes closed. "Then consider me all-"

He lunged, and bit Trevelyan’s lips in a fierce kiss. There was a moment of shock....then Trevelyan kissed him back ( _kissed him back!_ ) and hiked a long leg up his side. Blackwall’s hands wandered south to squeeze his ass.

Fuck it. He threw Trevelyan across the workbench. Those amber eyes flashed back— _fox_ —his back arched, his hips cocked, and Blackwall yanked his breeches down.

A bit of spit, a bit of bad aim, and sweet Maker he was in, easier than swinging a sword. Trevelyan moaned and gripped the edge of the workbench, teeth gritted in pain, pushed so hard by the first thrust that his toes lifted off the floor and curled—

“Blackwall?”

He blinked. Trevelyan was waving a hand in front of his face. “Are you all right? You look a little sun-touched.”

“I….that’s probably right.” He bent down to mess with his tools and arrange himself. “Now uh, what were you saying about Wardens?”

This could not go on. After Adamant, he decided, if they both survived, then he would tell him.

Then he'd tell him everything. 

 

* * *

 

Adamant was a nightmare. 

Two baths in ice water and the green stink of the Fade still clung to him. It was hard to say if the scent was real, or imagined, or real-imagined—oh piss on it, who cared. He needed a drink. 

It was feverish in the tavern. Cabot slid a frosty Ferelden lager across the bar. The Inquisition’s freshly blooded soldiers were rowdy and solemn in equal parts. Blackwall recognized it—celebration because the alternative was flashing images of dead friends and horror that would never, ever go away, and so they drank and laughed, slightly less hinged than they were before, staving off the day when everything terrible seemed funny in its way.

He turned and scanned the tables. Trevelyan rarely visited Herald's Rest. For all his cockiness, the mage shied from crowds, especially those with a bent towards the fawning.

Still, he passed through on occasion to see Sera in her room, or to wander up to the attic Cole haunted.

The door to Herald’s rest opened, and for a moment Blackwall's heart sang—

And in walked Dorian Pavus. Sugar to shit. The mage crossed the tavern with his nose up as if to breathe above the stink of the commons. He took the seat that the Iron Bull kicked his way and snapped his fingers for a tavern girl.

“—bet his tab is paid by you-know-who. Too good to sleep in the barracks, so he slithers his way into the only set of silk sheets in the castle. What did you expect from a Tevinter?”

“At least he's working for it.”

Blackwall blinked. Two soldiers he vaguely recognized from the training yard leaned against the bar, watching Dorian.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You don’t know?” The left soldier was giddy, despite the head-shaking of her companion. “Pavus got himself a cozy situation in a high holy bed.”

Time congealed. Blackwall's reflection distorted in the glass of a pickled egg jar. “What now?”

“I said—” The soldier leaned over and cupped her mouth. “PAVUS IS FUCKING THE INQUISITOR!”

The ensuing silence could not have been better if she dropped a glass.

Dorian flared an eyebrow at him across the bar. Blackwall remembered the puffy way Trevelyan’s lips had glistened in the barn as if they’d just been bitten...

He turned back to his drink and ordered five more.

 

* * *

 

He woke up in the kennels the next morning with a pickled egg in his pants and a wet sock in his mouth. It spoke to his state of mind that he buried his face in a dog's rump and went back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

“I overheard you asking about me and the Inquisitor at the tavern, Blackwall,” said Dorian, in the Emprise du Leon.

“I would not pry into the Inquisitor’s affairs,” he murmured.

“No?” Even with frozen snot in his mustache, the man had never seemed more pompous. “Are your whiskers quivering with curiosity? I can draw diagrams.”

Blackwall grabbed a fistful of the mage's cloak and backed him to the edge of an icy cliff. The fear in his eyes was all Blackwall needed. He set him down, and Dorian kept his quips to himself for the rest of the trip.

 

* * *

 

One night, listening to the Inquisitor’s red hart butt its antlers against the barn wall, he slid a hand down his stomach and shut his eyes.

More and more lately, he found himself skipping the dirty parts.

Instead, he imagined Trevelyan lying beside him while Blackwall stroked his back, their spent bodies warming each other on this cold night. Trevelyan would tuck his face against his neck and tell him how good he was, how he kept him sane, how he wasn't sure how he'd made it this far without him... 

Every word of it a lie. 

Blackwall got dressed and descended into the barn. He crossed the empty yard, up the stairs to the wall where the chill night wind whistled through the crenels. There were candles lit in the Inquisitor's tower, winking like stars high above Skyhold. 

Dorian Pavus was probably up there, too, posing in the Inquisitor's bed like a whore and distracting him from his paperwork.

And Blackwall was down here, a murderer in the dark, doing what he did best. 

The servants discovered no toys to take away the next day.

Unsurprisingly, he overheard at the tavern that Cyril Mornay had been caught in Val Royeaux. One bribe later and he got the report. The paper crumpled in his hands. 

It was almost a relief.

 

* * *

 

"You want to be worthy of the Inquisition, of...." Cole gasped. "Of him! Worthy, not the dwarf who stole Varric's books, but a weight, like a stone, wounded and waiting inside a warrior's heart." Cole looked confused. "But you already are!"

"No," said Blackwall, and blew the last shavings off the carved head of a fox. "Not yet I'm not."

 

* * *

 

Trevelyan approached him in the barn as the sun went down. Blackwall gave him a smile. “Fancy a drink? I've a hankering for company.”

Twenty minutes later they sat in an empty bar, staring at the wall in silence. Trevelyan cleared his throat.

“When I was a boy," said Blackwall. "I watched some children hang a dog from a noose until it was dead.”

"Andraste's ass, man."

"No, _listen_. I could have helped it, but I didn't, because I'm not like you. _You_ would have done something."

Trevelyan sipped his ale nervously.

"We could make the world a better place. It's just easier to shut our eyes." Blackwall's fists balled until they creaked. "There's always some dog out there, some fucking mongrel that doesn't know how to stay away." 

“Did you bring me here to kill me?” asked Trevelyan, leaning away.

“You would joke,” he murmured gruffly. _My fox._

In the end, he clapped Trevelyan on the back and saw himself out still sober.

Blackwall walked out of the tavern. Before dawn, Thom Rainier rode out of Skyhold.

 

* * *

 

Trevelyan wasn’t happy with him, to say the least.

“Well,” he sighed. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I am a murderer, a traitor, a monster,” growled Blackwall, Thom, he didn’t know anymore. “You should have left me to die—”

“Oh, stop acting like a child,” Trevelyan slouched on his throne like he was ready to melt off it. “Take the pardon.”

“It cannot be that simple.”

“Well, it is.” Trevelyan threw his hands up. “And unless you’re the Duchess of Val Foret here to bribe me with cheese tariffs, find your post.”

Blackwall picked himself up off the floor and returned to the barn with the beasts. He picked up the hammer and chisel, selected a piece of wood, then tossed them aside and crashed into the wet straw of the nearest open stall. 

 

* * *

 

After a mandatory period of awkwardness, Trevelyan asked him along on an expedition to the Hissing Wastes. On the way back, they stopped in Val Royeaux for supplies on the hottest day of the year. The white streets burned, and the shade was thick with nobles sweating in their silks.

Blackwall felt scorched clean. Lighter than air somehow. But hollow.

The Inquisitor and Dorian had disappeared under a loggia. From where Blackwall sat on the canal, he couldn't see them, but he could certainly hear them: bench legs creaking, Trevelyan's boots scraping against the floor. Rough breath. Buckles.

 _"_ Uck _."_ Sera flopped down beside him. "They've boldened up. And bolted up. And nutted-"

"I get it, Sera." 

“Hey.” She shoved a paper cone of roast chicken livers in his face.

“Not hungry,” he murmured.

“Suit yourself.” She tossed a chunk in her mouth and knocked their knees together. “You really need to pop one off on him, get it out of your system.”

"That would not be proper," he said.

"Pffft. Who said anything about proper? He's friggin Trevelyan, what's he going to do, get mad at you?" She cackled. "Since when has that ever happened?"

Blackwall blinked.

"Sera," he said softly. "Oh, how I do love you."

Trevelyan and Dorian eventually came out of their nook, smoothing their cloaks and adjusting themselves. Blackwall cleared his throat. "Remind me when we get back to Skyhold that there's something I wish to speak to you about."

"Oh?" Trevelyan popped his collar. "It needs to keep, then?"

"No," said Blackwall, stealing a liver from Sera's cone. "But it will."

They set a leisurely pace as they left Val Royeaux. Children were playing with wooden griffins at an Inquisition recruitment stall as they passed them near the gates.

 

* * *

 

"There was something you wanted to tell me?" 

Trevelyan stood in a rectangle of light at the entrance of the barn. Blackwall had washed his neck and face that morning, and even run a comb through his hair. 

He had also memorized everything he was going to say, which was conveniently blown away by the wind whistling between his ears.

Dorian Pavus leaned against a post in the yard, tapping his foot impatiently.

"Blackwall? Are you all right?" asked Trevelyan.

_No matter what I was or what becomes of me, right now, I am just a man with his heart laid bare._

"I uh.....I wanted to.....you're so....oh sod it." 

Blackwall grabbed a fistful of the Inquisitor's shirt and dragged him down into a kiss.

In his fantasies, he held Trevelyan in his arms and expressed every hurt and ache to him through his lips. 

In his fantasies, he knocked Dorian's smug perfect teeth out, threw Trevelyan cheering over his shoulder, and marched him up into the hayloft to ravish him. 

Naturally this wasn't a fantasy, so he slobbered all over Trevelyan's face for five seconds before he came in his pants. 

When Blackwall finally released him, Trevelyan blinked, his back hunched up like a disturbed cat with one eye squinted shut. ".....I can't even deal with this right now."

"I'm-" Dorian Pavus was marching across the yard with murder on his face. "So incredibly sorry." 

 

* * *

 

"I'm pretty sure you won't have frostbite," said Trevelyan. 

Blackwall could only grunt from where he was frozen to the barn door. Trevelyan's fiery hands waved up and down, thawing him. His beard broke free with a crunch. "Can't say I didn't deserve it."

"I'm sure we'll all wake up tomorrow as friends," said Trevelyan. The emphasis on the last word was unmistakable. "By the way, I never asked what I should call you now. We can stick to Blackwall, if you like, though infamous rogue of the road Thom Rainier has its charm."  

The name on the Inquisitor's tongue didn't scare him anymore, and that in itself was a revelation. 

"Blackwall will serve just fine," he said.

 


End file.
